We got an enormous amount of ground covered in terms of hashing out conceptual problems, and I think we're all a lot more clear on what it is we're trying to make and how that might come about. We started off taking a look at what each person had done over the last month, with clearly the most visible development coming from the coding team - Tai has made a good start on learning Java, and Jamie has got the basic mapping and texture loading done. So we can see how a battlefield would look (it's looking very Tactics-y) already, which I was not expecting to get in the first month.
The meat of the meeting, though, was Relm and Tai leading us through their ideas for mechanics and game design, which quickly led us to a long and intricate debate over a central tension in the creation of this game - to what degree do we sacrifice narrative fidelity to include interesting game mechanics? On the one hand, we have people who want to make a good plot with deep and interesting characters. On the other, we want the game to allow players to play around with the characters' skills and abilities, and to keep it very open. We don't want each character to have their job/class/role fixed from the start, unchangeable; but we also don't want characters that are blank slates in the pursuit of customisability.
After a lot of discussion on this point, it seems that we came to the following conclusion - we can separate to large degree a character's personality from their combat role and abilities. A given character may be able to be a fighter, a healer, an archer or a mage depending on which skills you give her, but whichever she is at a given time she will also have a core personality that is unchanged, and which colours the specific manifestation of her chosen role. A morally-ambiguous guttersnipe of a character could be a melee fighter by being an assassin, or a mage by being a warlock who has made a pact with a demon for power - a different character could fill the same roles, with the same general skills, but might end up being a knight for the former or a druid for the latter.
This modularity of character customisation (a system of Relm's devising involving action-granting items being equipped to a character, which can be swapped out when wanted) may be a nucleus from which Mike can begin brainstorming. It seems he's had a bit of paralysis over ideas because when you can make a plot about ANYTHING in ANY setting, it becomes very difficult to come up with anything which isn't generic. Starting from today, he (and others) may start getting some cool ideas. How does this world differ due to the fact that anyone can change their combat focus at any time? It's a world where 25 years dedicating yourself to swordsmanship doesn't necessarily make you better at it than someone who's just decided to pick up a sword after studying magic tomes for the last few years. How do people switch so easily? One suggestion was a concept of an immortal soul that grows in power and, with the right items, can channel that power in different ways. Change the objects, and the manifestation of the power changes. Another was mechs, with abilities determined by the systems load-out chosen for each mech suit. I'm looking forward to seeing where these questions will take us.
We also discussed the scope of the project, due to different people having very different views of how long the finished product will be. Much of this is down to us really not knowing how much work it will be to, say, add 6 hours of content to a 6 hour game compared to making that 6 hour game in the first place. We may find that it takes surprisingly little to add content once we've got the main systems up, or we may find that the art/dialogue assets required would just simply be too much. After a lot of back and forth on this, we came to the conclusion that starting out making a short game would be best - if it looks likely that we could easily expand it to a longer game then we could, but best not to bite off more than we can chew right from the off. It also means that we can do a 'proof of concept' game first, perhaps with slightly more limited character/skill selection, art assets, and a rather short plot. After that, we can either greatly expand upon it in a second version, or have that as the first part and make a sequel. Or we could take what we've learned and make something completely different, armed with better knowledge of how things work and what we can/cannot do. So it looks like Thundercut will end up being a shortish game, which is fine for everyone. Oh, and it'll be working on a square grid, because screw hexes. They're great for some parts of the game design, but they're just too damned fiddly.
This isn't everything that we covered, and I'm sure I'm leaving out large chunks of important developments. Hopefully we'll have a few other blog-post reports from other people focusing on what they found most interesting. I'm going to leave it at that, for now, with a big grin on my face. Night.
This isn't everything that we covered, and I'm sure I'm leaving out large chunks of important developments. Hopefully we'll have a few other blog-post reports from other people focusing on what they found most interesting. I'm going to leave it at that, for now, with a big grin on my face. Night.
Great stuff all round. I ought to point out that one of the common conceits of a setting like this is that the main characters are in some way special. Teenagers with weird super powers, or people with demon blood, or soldiers with access to prototype technology. That way the rest of the world doesn't have this conceit - it's the players (and probably the bad guys) who have this power.
ReplyDeleteAs a bit of an aside, there was a PSX game whose name I forget, where the core concept was that there were these kind of biomechanical symbionts called Seru, which you could strap on to give yourself powers like super strength or magic. But a weird mist thing made everyone who was wearing one turn into monsters (except the main characters who had special ones).
I kind of stopped before I explained what the hell that had to do with what I was saying. The point is, they were very useful, but because it was a civilised world, they were mostly used for things like construction or police work - normal people didn't use them much, because they didn't need to.
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